Dangerous Liaisons 1960

Surprisingly, Roger Vadim’s contemporary pseudoadaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th-century masterpiece Les liaisons dangereusesthe film’s title now in English and the year of the original U.S. release addedhasn’t dated at all. It’s just as silly as it ever wasa surprisingly puritanical reading of the novel that tries strenuously to seem depraved. There’s a fadeout before every bout of lovemaking, and the comeuppance of the plot’s two leading characters, whom Vadim comically turns into a married couple (Gerard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau), is a lot more moralistically severe than anything meted out to them in the novel. Beginning with a hokey on-camera appearance by Vadim himself explaining the story’s moral, the movie unleashes fancy (if gratuitous) mise en scene around its trendy libertine and Barbie-doll characters, who spend their time at parties and at a Swiss ski resort, with jazz by Thelonious Monk and others used like ambient wallpaper. There are at least a dozen French films released in 1960 better than this one, but it’s reasonably diverting on its own limited terms. Scripted by Roger Vailland and Claude Brule; with Annette Vadim, Jeanne Valerie, Simone Renant, and a very young looking Jean-Louis Trintignant, who was previously featured in Vadim’s better and more genuinely antibourgeois And God Created Woman. (JR)

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